A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies.

By V. Spike Peterson. New York: Routledge, 2003. 256p. $100.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

At the outset, the author boldly declares her objective as no less than “to generate a methodologically plural, trans-disciplinary account of globalization” and to “rewrite global political economy (GPE) by demonstrating the interdependence of reproductive, productive and virtual economies” (p. 13). This is to be achieved through the deployment of “two conceptual innovations”—an “alternative … more expansive ‘RPV framing’” (the acronym referring to the three economies identified in the book's subtitle) coupled with something called “triad analytics.” In tandem they will supposedly enable a “more inclusive relational and critical study of global political economy” (p. 2). The targets of the book are clear enough: globalized neoliberalism and all of its defenders and apologists, along with (nearly) all of their conceptual apparatus. In their place, V. Spike Peterson intends to offer the reader an “accessible and coherent (though not definitive or totalizing) narrative of ‘how we got here,’ ‘what is going on’ and ‘what it means’” (p. 13). All of this is, moreover, to be packed within 173 pages.

Peterson offers us an “opening move” rather than the “last word” (p. 15) and acknowledges that because of the wide-ranging focus of the analysis, there are some glaring omissions, not least an “inattention to individual and collective agency” (p. 16). The omission is indeed glaring, but it is in part the product of a more troublesome failure to address overtly the normative subtext that runs throughout the analysis. In part, this seems to be the product of an overwrought preoccupation with identifying the contemporariness of the book's intellectual credentials. It is certainly postpositivist in sentiment, apparently critical-theoretic, and, ambiguously, postmodern or poststructuralist in orientation. It is hard not to get the impression that, apart from the nasty folk at the top of the global economic pile, the author sets out to offend no one and to include not only every class of person but also every variety of postpositivist critique of the global status quo. An additional confessed omission is a focus on “forms of activism and resistance,” even though in politicizing the GPE, the analysis nonetheless “can inform resistance and opposition” (p. 16). This omission is defended on the grounds that the complexity of the subject matter precludes simple or universal prescriptions, as does the need for “plural strategies” to take account of “local conditions.” These are fair points. Nonetheless, Peterson seemingly shares, or at least appears to want to share, with many contemporary poststructuralist writers a peculiar aversion to politics in any normative sense. This is only partly masked by frequent but insubstantial references to the centrality of the “political” or a need to “politicize,” both of which appear at bottom to be little more than codes for engaging in a normative analysis that, paradoxically, is immediately ruled out methodologically. Some poststructuralists defend this position robustly and consistently. Peterson does neither.

The first two chapters of A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, which introduce the author's aims, objectives, and theoretical orientation(s), are the weakest. In particular, Chapter 2—“Theory Matters”—fails to deliver on the claims to novelty and novel synthesis made in Chapter 1, offering little more than a potpourri of contemporary analytical perspectives coupled with a residual nod in the direction of orthodoxy, a sort of poststructuralist-lite. The reader is offered painless, fashionably borderless, curiously tension-free “theory”: “The framing specifically rejects the separation of culture from economy, economics from politics, agent from structure, or domestic from international politics; it insists on understanding economic phenomena as embedded in wider social relations. By encouraging analysis of symbols and structures in relation, the framing merges interpretive (cultural, post-modernist) and empirical (material, modernist) commitments. In sum the RPV framing is cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-level and multi-causal” (p. 39; emphasis in the original).

Laying out the theory side of things leaves only 128 pages in which to survey the global economy in all its multiplicities and fulfill the multifarious analytical ambitions. Not surprisingly, this results in a rather breathless tour of multiple dimensions of the GPE. Yet this is in fact where the book hits its straps. Although the much-heralded analytical framework ultimately seems to provide little more than a set of organizing subheadings, the three chapters on the “productive economy,” “reproductive economy,” and “virtual economy” work well as useful and comprehensive surveys of quite vast literatures. A lot of ground is covered and a number of key themes—notably the gendered dimension of GPE—are carried through successfully and with force. There is little that is novel in all of this, however, and the author's critical engagement with the “critical” literature is virtually nonexistent beyond occasional recognitions of the contestability of several of the larger claims about global trends and shifts. Critiques of the various forms of the globalization thesis receive short shrift. There are also some especially weak patches; the discussion of “digitization as process and politics” (pp. 135–37) is very thin, failing, surprisingly, to engage with the considerable evidence of the politically empowering dimensions of the information technology revolution. Nonetheless, there is real value in the overview provided by the three core chapters, sufficient in fact to recommend the book as a very useful teaching text. The three core chapters alone would be manna to students struggling to meet a multiplicity of essay deadlines.

Although it struggles to raise its head above the white noise of overly declaratory yet curiously noncommittal theorizing, underpinning the descriptive core of the book is an often incisive critical take on GPE that resonates with old-fashioned progressivism and is none the worse for this. Thus, the decline of the welfare state is frequently bemoaned, albeit in often infuriatingly overgeneralized terms (a comparison of child-care provision in the UK and Sweden alone would offer a critical take on this). Alone, this cries out for some kind of follow-through, perhaps on the revalorization of the state as a site of resistance, especially given the highly gendered consequences of neoliberal economic policy that Peterson convincingly points up. Unfortunately, the concluding chapter offers little more than a long-winded discourse on the normative underpinnings of the neoliberal global project (something most U.S. neoconservatives have been overtly and proudly declaring for some time) and the final observation that “the valorizing code of capitalist, racialized patriarchy is inimical to structural equality and a just global order” (p. 173). Most “critical” scholars worth their salt got that point quite some time ago as the author's own survey frequently shows. The architects of the contemporary global order have no compunction about getting political. It is a pity that Peterson does not at least share that with them, as I would rather read the “longer … and different” book (p. 16) that she feels such a commitment would require.